Day 7 – Kimi no Na Wa

I woke up this morning thinking that I should probably get out of bed. But I didn’t. Today, I felt like staying in bed.

About a few weeks ago my mom and I went to the bookstore (Barnes & Noble, to be specific) to get some journals. This is something new for me in three different ways. One, I usually do not go out shopping with my mom. Second, I usually do not go out shopping in general. Third, and this is the most important one, I don’t keep a journal. Lately I’ve felt it imperative upon myself to keep a journal. A reasonably updated journal. A journal that I would actually write in and would have writing in for more than the first few weeks of attempting to have a journal. In other words, I wanted to successfully say that I kept a journal this school year. That means writing in the journal, writing every day in the journal, writing important things in the journal, and writing, well, anything in the journal.

I should probably write something today.

Let’s do that.

So my journal is upstairs, neatly tucked into a backpack I haven’t touched since finals week and shoved into a corner of my room. So I walked out of the kitchen where I was writing this post, past a living room where two unplayed pianos sit, down the hallway, up the staircase, past my brother’s room where he’s probably watching a stream and doing web design at the same time (or Path of Exile), and straight into my room. It’s a mess. The laundry from a week ago is splayed out in front of the dresser, and I was apparently supposed to fold all of my clothes and put them in the dresser as soon as I got them out of the dryer. But I feel especially lazy this time. So I have my journal, come back down, pause for a moment because I want to look at the other journals I bought from the bookstore and admire the fact that I may potentially never use them for their intended purpose. I go back upstairs and slowly ease them out of my bookshelf. As if to finalize my purchase from a few weeks ago, I take off all the plastic wrapping.
Beautiful.
Pausing for a moment, I see that my fingers are a lot more jittery today than usual. It reminds me of the morning I had a grand mal seizure two months ago. I had a banana and a donut that morning and nothing else. Probably why I had a seizure that day. Anyways, my hands were jittery that day much like they are now, and it won’t stop. I ate Belgian waffles and tea today. I think I’m good on that front, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying.
A similar instance of the tremors happening occurred when I visited a friend and tried to eat gumbo with a small spoon. I don’t consider that event an A+ performance in eating gumbo out of a bowl with a small spoon. If anything, it may have deserved a C-. I was legitimately ashamed at myself for how poorly I ate that gumbo. I don’t remember it really affecting my motor skills that much other than trying to fit a spoon of Cajun goodness into my mouth with mixed results, and I was even driving for 40 minutes at a time that day, so I don’t think I was in much danger during that time. It definitely didn’t end with a seizure that day. But this does remind me of that.

I’m rambling about nothing. That’s wrong, I suppose, because it’s here and taking up a majority of my word count, that should count as at least rambling about something. I just tweeted my hand. In hindsight, I don’t have much of an idea of why that was necessary. I could have just recorded it and left it on my phone for future records. Maybe it didn’t seem interesting enough to just forget about it. So why not have someone else know about it? Keeping things to yourself did you no good throughout life, after all.

Back to the topic at hand because I think I just wasted about a half hour on honing my typing skills instead of staying on topic, journals are hard. And the main thing I really paid attention to when watching Kimi no Na Wa for the second time was the film’s focus on daily routine, and the fact that the love interests communicated to each other primarily through their diaries. Having a daily log was an idea I never really paid attention to until recently, because in the middle of popping pills and going in and out of doctors offices during school hours it didn’t really occur to me that, yeah, writing things down tends to help you remember things better than if you didn’t. Having a plan for yourself, having a schedule for how things should work day to day, it never occurred to me that it could be useful to how I personally function. Alerts for work shifts. Reminders for assignments and projects. Those things are legitimately useful to do.

So it’s surprising to me, for the most part, that people can write in their journals as consistently as Taki and Mitsuha did. It made me wonder about what I do to remember my day to day actions. As you may guess by now, I wouldn’t be able to remember much about days where I didn’t write about them. Those hours tend to blur into weeks at a time, half because I’m having absence seizures all the day long and half because I’m depressed and both of those things tend to have an effect on how long you can concentrate. I bet, if a body swap were to happen to me, whoever would read my journal would be a bit puzzled as to why there would be patches of blank spaces in between days where I should have been writing down things.

How would a body swap into a person with a mental condition work, anyways?

Would the invader be influenced by the body’s brain activity? Like, if you were to remember a particular memory fondly and that memory is the main reason your serotonin levels are stable, would being in a depressed person’s body affect the way you look at that same memory? Would that feeling persist even when you switched back to your original bodies? I wonder if there’s science fiction out there that deals with this.

In the meantime, I’m just impressed that people can write about their own lives so consistently and without any lapse in motivation. I’m always struggling with motivation issues so if I were to discover some sort of method or maneuver that would allow me to just write the important things in my life down in a timely and concise fashion by having my consciousness sent to the body of a control freak, I feel like I could do a lot of good with my life.

That’s not what Kimi no Na Wa is really about, of course. The film is cheeky and funny about its body swapping, with very effective results I might add, and the journals only really serve the purpose of correspondence between Taki and Mitsuha as they involuntarily exchange lives. And while my ramblings today don’t really fit into whether I have a good or bad opinion of this movie in general, even if I did explicitly state in the spreadsheet that this was going to be some sort of review, I would be interested in a story that took the film’s idea and applied a closer look to how people write journals, whether they be on an actual book, their cell phone, a notebook, or maybe even loose leaf paper. Journals are very personal. I’m feeling very personal about what I want to write. Maybe that’s the reason.

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One comment

I, too find keeping a journal tough to do consistently. I guess Taki and Mitsuha are both preternaturally motivated (at least at first) by the fact that the journal-keeping allows both of them to avoid coming off as amnesiac doofuses. Shoot, in the face of that, I’d probably keep exhaustive notes too.